In 1968, CKEY Toronto finally made it to 10,000 watts both day and night, but they needed five 150 foot top loaded towers to do it. They had paid for a frequency move by CKAR Huntsville in 1964 so they could move from 580 to 590 KHz and increase power. That same year, CKEY abandoned their long fight with CHUM for Top 40 supremacy; clearly CHUM had won. CKEY switched to Middle of the Road. The station began as CKCL in 1925 on 840 KHz with 500 watts. What had been CKEY ended up as multicultural CHKT-1430 when Telemedia did a frequency swap in 1995 between two former Top 40 competitors of CHUM: CKFH and CKEY, both with different call letters by that time. Today, 590 is the Toronto home to CJCL "The Fan" with 50,000 watts, Rogers as their owner, and an All Sports format. If you trace the history of stations by license, you would undoubtedly find that CJCL is the station that began as CKCL.
In 1993, CKLG-AM Vancouver stopped playing music, after gradually increasing the Talk programming since April. This ended the station's 29 years of continuous Contemporary Hit Radio (CHR) programming, a record shared with CHUM-AM Toronto. CCF quotes the two stations as sharing the record for longest running CHR station in Canada.
In 1997, CKAL-TV Calgary signed on as A-Channel. Its sister station in Edmonton had signed on two days earlier. Owner Craig Broadcast Systems sold the stations to CHUM in 2004, and they were both rebranded as City-TV in 2005.
In 2004, CHMZ-FM Tofino, B.C. was licensed by the CRTC. The station signed on August 16, 2005, as "The Bear" on 90.1 MHz with 170 watts. The call letters were intended to be pronounced "Chimz", a local native word for bear. Founding Owner Matthew McBride had been the General Manager of Central Island Broadcasting of Nanaimo.
